Suu Kyi stresses unity of humanity

When she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1991, while under house arrest in Burma,
Aung San Suu Kyi
said she realised Burmese “were not going to be forgotten".

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded her the prize, she said in her Nobel lecture in Oslo 21 years later, it was recognition that “the oppressed and the isolated in Burma were also a part of the world, they were recognising the oneness of humanity".

It was a remarkable moment for the slight Ms Suu Kyi, who turns 67 next week and is now a member of Parliament and the leader of Burma’s opposition.

She was dressed in shades of purple and lavender, her hair adorned with flowers.

It is a gesture she makes in honour of her father, Aung San, an independence hero of Burma, who was assassinated in 1947, when she was two, but whom she ­remembers threading flowers through her hair.

The audience in Oslo’s City Hall, which included the Norwegian royal family, listened raptly, applauding often, standing to clap when Ms Suu Kyi entered the hall and when she finished her speech, which was at the same time modest, personal and touching, an appeal to find practical ways to reduce the suffering of the world.

“Suffering degrades, embitters and enrages," she said. “War is not the only arena where peace is done to death."

Absolute peace was an unattainable goal, she said. “But it is one towards which we must continue to journey, our eyes fixed on it as a traveller in a desert fixes his eyes on the one guiding star that will lead him to salvation."

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She had thought much on the Buddhist idea of dukkha, or ­suffering, in her long years of isolation and house arrest, she said. “If suffering were an unavoidable part of our existence, we should try to alleviate it as far as possible in practical, earthly ways."

One crucial avenue, she said, was simple kindness. “Of the sweets of adversity, and let me say that those are not numerous, I have found the sweetest, the most precious of all, is the lesson I learned on the value of kindness," she said, with a rare shred of humour.

“Every kindness I received, small or big, convinced me that there could never be enough of it in the world." Kindness, she said, “can change the lives of people".

“In my own country," she said, “hostilities have not ceased in the far north," and “to the west, communal violence" has flared in the days before she left Burma.